Also on masto: https://mastodon.technology/@aspensmonster
Cryptobros present bitcoin as an hedge against inflation. The best hedge against inflation is Socialism, because things are priced according to their cost of production, not by how much profit someone will make.
Commodities are sold at their cost of production in capitalism too. Profit is the surplus value that is stolen during the process rather than distributed to the worker.
Slashdot: where old racist tech workers go to bemoan the loss of the good old days.
The monopoly wannabe asks the actual monopoly for help becoming a monopoly.
I feel like I have to choose between a capitalist dystopia and “communist” authoritarianism.
Those are the choices. And if you choose capitalism, you choose wrong.
I’m almost done with this thread :) gotta add the last two chapters.
Edit (2022-08-10T14:28:00-05:00): Thread complete now.
Join the SRA. It’s a young and imperfect org, but it’s the best one we have so far for socialist education and advocacy of community defense and firearm rights.
BY THE DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT
Been re-watching the Matrix movies. Resurrections gets better with each viewing :)
Wouldn’t want the patient sleeping at night now would we? That’s what the daytime is for!
It’s meh. A political party --a political party in the US, anyway-- putting something in their platform means nothing.
Wouldn’t be surprised if more incidents like this pop up if they actually go through with outlawing abortion. And if they do, then I’m sympathetic to those incidents. I see no moral difference between killing someone with a pen stroke and killing someone with a pistol.
Has the abortion ruling been released yet?
That last pane though 😁
I can see why people would object.
A homeless shelter just shifts a problem geographically. All the misfits who used to be dispersed, all move to this one place. They gain shelter but the neighbourhood gets all the city’s social problems, concentrated.
Maybe a compromise is possible.
Instead of just housing, build housing & workplaces & leisure & amenities all in one place. So the residents tend to congregate inside, out of sight, rather then in the street. This way also has a real chance of helping the homeless out of poverty.
And here we have a perfect example of someone who “cares deeply about the problem being pushed away from them and out of sight.”
I honestly didn’t expect a reply quite so soon and quite so on the nose.
I find this to be the most interesting part of the substack article by Caitlin Johnstone:
And this all comes out after US officials straight up told the press that the Biden administration has been deliberately sowing disinformation to the public using the mainstream press in order to win an infowar against the Kremlin. They’ve literally just been circulating completely baseless stories about Russia and Ukraine, but nobody seems to be calling for the social media accounts of Biden administration officials to be banned.
In particular, it references another substack article also written by Caitlin Johnstone, which ultimately references an NBC News report that strongly corroborates the notion that the U.S. empire is “deliberately sowing disinformation to the public using the mainstream press in order to win an infowar against the Kremlin”:
It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.
President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.
…
Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”
…
At times, the Biden administration has released information in which it has less confidence or about things that are possible rather than truly likely.
…
Two U.S. officials said the intelligence about whether Putin’s inner circle was lying to him wasn’t conclusive — based more on analysis than hard evidence. Other officials disputed that, saying the intelligence was very reliable and had been vetted at the highest levels.
…
Likewise, a charge that Russia had turned to China for potential military help lacked hard evidence, a European official and two U.S. officials said.
The U.S. officials said there are no indications China is considering providing weapons to Russia. The Biden administration put that out as a warning to China not to do so, they said.
Thanks for posting this 👍
What can Mozilla do about it? In my opinion, they sunk their own ship two years ago by either completely axing, or substantially reducing, some of their most important teams:
The video’s suggestion --developing an in-browser financial tool similar to Patreon so that they can cut themselves off from Google’s annual 400 million dollar check-- is a good one. But people have been screaming at Mozilla for a decade now to sever themselves from Google. It’s not going to happen. And it’s understandable why the YouTuber in the video, Gardiner Bryant, does not understand why it will not happen: he explicitly calls himself a “capitalist but not a corporatist” in this very video, and so he misses the obvious contradiction at the heart of Mozilla.
That contradiction is that Mozilla’s leadership holds the same class interests as Google’s leadership. We’re talking about a leadership that views a 500k USD annual salary as a “financial burden.” At the end of the day, the people leading Firefox are every bit as capitalist as their surveillance capitalist peers at the FAANGs of Silicon Valley. At the end of the day, they have more in common than they do in difference. In this predicable story, Firefox is the “good-natured, good-hearted, capitalism-with-a-human-face” liberal fox in the mix of a land full of brutal surveillance capitalist wolves. How truly poetic then that they chose a fox for their mascot.
If Firefox is not only to “live,” but to thrive as a counter-weight to the hegemony of the surveillance capitalists, then its workers need to seize the means of production. They must sever themselves entirely from their leadership, form a collective socialist co-op, move away from high cost of living areas like San Francisco (or California or even any city in the US), work entirely remotely across the globe (believe it or not, there is talent to be found outside the valley), and focus entirely on developing a browser that works for the workers of the world, with no concern given for the thoughts or feelings of their capitalist adversaries in industry. Their only boss can be the workers of the world. Their only revenue can come from those workers.
Ultimately, Mozilla is a textbook example of how you cannot serve two bosses. When push comes to shove, the interests of the capitalist ruling class supercede the interests of the workers/users. And so long as they want to have their cake and eat it too, that quo will not change.
Supply and demand describe the fluctuations of the prices of commodities about their costs of production. They do not describe the prices of the commodities themselves. Oil’s demand is relatively inelastic --and its supply constrained by cartels-- and as such its price can remain detached from its costs of production, enabling super-profits.
Suggested reading: